The Idea-smithy

Ever met someone who reminds you strongly, sharply of someone else? Even when they don’t look alike, sound alike or seem to have anything in common? What about situations that seem to keep repeating over and over again? We date the same kind of person, our spouses remind us of our teachers, our friends treat us the way our siblings did.

I think we start our lives with a list of things to be done. There are relationships to be built, conversations to be started & completed, memories to be revisited, hurts to be forgiven, actions to be completed. It is all unfinished business.

I remember hearing someone define ‘Kalyug’ as the age where nothing would be carried over to the next birth but avenged, paid back and completed in this birth itself. I don’t know whether that is so or not. But it does seem to make good sense to me to finish all that I came to this birth for. The universe provides me endless ways to do it. I discern patterns, some of which I can’t quite explain the logic for but I see them anyway.

Absence of proof is not proof of absence

said my mathematics teacher and those words underline how I receive these impressions.

There are people I feel a strong…I can’t define the feeling, can only feel its intensity…connection to. These connections are usually characterized by a strong awareness of the person when they enter the room (and my life). I am much more sensitive to their words and actions and feelings than to other people, which means that I am more perceptive about them as well as more prone to being disturbed and even hurt by them.

I’ve examined thoroughly what it is I find so familiar in certain people and I find it is often residual feelings or unfinished conversations. Often I’ve had the same person come back into my life….old friendships that just died away for no apparant reason, almost-forgotten-but-really-not-really loves…..people who have impacted me deeply at one point of time and have been ‘cleanly shut away’. And I find I keep running into the person again and again and again until I finally sort it out. And a few times, when I just haven’t been able to, I’ve find other people who remind me of that person, I find myself in familiar situations and having to deal with the same things. It is sort of like life sending me surrogate situations to learn the same lessons.

This is unfinished business coming back to pester me to finish it. These are examples of opportunity knocking more than once, in different bodies this time. And these are only people. There are things I’ve felt I should do, things I’ve felt I was meant to do, some ways of being that I felt I was born for.

Some of them didn’t fit into the way I had envisaged my life…..things like writing and art and music, things like taking leadership, things like being protector instead of protected. Some of them went totally against my beliefs of who I was and wanted to be. But somehow I’ve found I can’t dodge them. Writing and art continue to haunt me, ideas nudging my logical processes gently and then more persistently till I have no peace of mind until I’ve written or painted. Writing threatens to take me over and carry me away like a river. I fell into blogging entirely by mistake and without my realizing it has grown far beyond what I thought. It is like the ideas and words control me and not the other way round.

Invariably I land up in situations where I end up taking charge, regardless of how inadequately prepared I am. I never thought of myself as a strong person, the kind who could protect and lead others but somehow when the situations arise, it is like someone else has taken over my body and mind and is commanding me to go through the actions to take on the role.

I have no clue what happened when my grandfather died, four years ago. One moment I was an average youngster, sniveling over the boyfriend who had dumped me and grousing about the hopelessness of the education system and my life. Another moment I was rock-solid, dry-eyed fortress into which my family could retreat and feel their sorrow. I didn’t cry a tear….and it wasn’t that I was holding back. I just didn’t feel the need to break down at all, I just knew instinctively that I had to be the wall that held against this storm and sheltered my family from the horrendous pain they were feeling.

It hasn’t followed a pattern. I am not innately strong, especially when it comes to letting go of people I’ve loved. I brood and hurt and grieve long after everyone says I should really stop feeling sorry for myself. It is a bad feeling, especially since I feel that this is my real nature and those odd moments of strength came from an outside force that was just using my body as a vehicle at that time.

As I can see it, I am too small to be ever able to comprehend the enormity of the patterns. What I can do is keep noticing more and more and trying somehow to understand. There are enough of clues; the more I look, the more I find. Besides there is comfort in the fact that when I do miss an opportunity, it will come back and knock again.

Also cross-posted on IFSHA.

Where do we look for the truth? And how do we know if the answers we find are the right ones?

Several centuries of mankind and so much to show at the end of it…. science, technology, mathematics, art, culture, religion. Each one is an attempt to explain the universe that we see around us. And there is as yet so much that we have still to understand. So much that we have only the vaguest of ideas about, a faint glimmer of understanding, so much that seems unbelievable and silly even…..and yet the concept of Earth as a sphere seemed ridiculous at a point of time. It would be naive to assume that the things we haven’t found a way to explain don’t exist at all.

Science and religion have waged a war for years. Various ways of understanding life and predicting the future have held popularity and died away. Some of them continue to conflict and co-exist. All over the world, people are trying to find answers to questions that have persisted….Who am I? What am I doing here? What is the meaning of life? Is there an after-life? Is there God? Where are we going?

I don’t claim to have any of the answers. But I’ve been looking for them for a long time and I think I might find them by listening to voices that have been speaking for years….the voices of intuition. I see some common reactions when I discuss this with others. There is the all out skepticism, the retorts about ‘mumbo-jumbo’. There are also those who fear the ‘dark arts’ and things that don’t fit into their daily frame of reference. However there is almost always a strong interest, a fascination with that which is not directly visible to our eyes. The Celestine Prophecy predicts a world-wide awakening to things hithero unexplained by science or any of the ‘rational’ thought-processes. I can see that happening all around me.

I like to think of a nice metaphor to illustrate this. Think of a house with 5 people in it. These five people live in it, interact with each other and take decisions on how to run the house. Each of them has a way of looking at things, unique strengths and shortcomings. Four of these people have had the power divided among themselves for a long time and have allotted roles in decision-making. The fifth one has just a voice but no one hears it.

These five people are:
My mind: Intelligence, logic, intellect, rationale
My heart: Emotions, feelings, attachments
My body: Physical sensations, whatever can be touched and felt
My people: Family, friends and anybody who had an influence on me.
My intuition

The first four have their say in some way or the other. In a lot of people one of those is a dominant factor and overshadows the others. Intuition barely has a say for most people or when it does, it is attributed to the emotions. I am making a distinction here between emotions and intuitions. One is what we feel for the world around us…it is expression….of love, hate, anger, surprise, betrayal, fondness etc. The other is what is internalized from the world outside us…it is impression…messages that come into our being, which we don’t listen to because we are conditioned to believe only in what comes in through our eyes and ears.

Since I’ve started listening, I find my awareness of my intuition has increased. I cannot say my intuition has improved because it has always been there. It is like I suddenly realize that the voice has been there all my life, only I never chose to listen to it or acknowledge its presence. It is akin to tuning into radio frequencies and stopping at one point and realizing that what you’d written off as white noise so far is actually music.

I’ll take the metaphor furthur. Someone I know says that she never experiences intuition and she always wonders whether what she hears inside her head are her own fears and/or her wants. I know that feeling, I used to experience that too. It is like the heart sometimes speaks the words of intution in her voice…..so what we think are our emotions are actually our intuitions. I look back at the people I gravitate to and now I’m able to see which of those are people I chose because I liked them and which of those I was compelled to meet to fulfil a higher pattern.

The mind and body play these games as well. Fear itself is a joint effort of intuition, mind and body. Science has broken down the fear instinct and explained how it is a legacy of our animal ancestors to sense danger and be physically prepared to run, defend or attack. In a lot of ways the distinction between mind and intuition blurs and I really can’t say which is which.

I’ll end this by saying that we are incomplete until every force inside us finds a voice. If you give a person a chance to speak, he will eventually say something. It is just upto each of us to figure out whether we really do want to listen to what our intuition is telling us.

Also cross-posted on IFSHA.

I’m usually a real home-bird. That will surprise a lot of people who know me because I spend so little time in my house. But that’s a place with four walls. The fact is that I have a strong attachment to places, especially those with memories. I relate to places almost the way I do, with people. Leaving a place feels like a part of me is getting torn away, much like parting with a loved one. And being in a new place, much like meeting a new person, fills me with a mixture of apprehension and excitement. Apprehension since the new experience is so different from the ones I’m used to. Excitement over the very same thing. And oh, actually a new place (and a new person) always remind me of why I love home so much (or the people in my life). Travelling has always been a learning experience and one that ends with the exuberant feeling of “I’m home!!!!”.

I travelled to London this week. It is my first trip out of the continent. And for a long time now, I’ve looked forward to visiting the land of Enid Blyton, the Beatles, P G Wodehouse, Harry Potter and Bridget Jones. The first thing I felt when I walked out of Heathrow was the cold, crisp air on my face (bundled up as I was everywhere else). And then the thought that I finally understood the meaning of ‘cold, crisp air’.

I got a lot of work done, met a lot of people from different countries. It was interesting. But something was missing. What? The apprehension. And the excitement. I wasn’t a bit nervous as I usually am with new people. I didn’t develop stage-fright even as I made a presentation to a panel of the top management. And would you believe it….I was dressed in an orange pullover and jeans in a roomful of suits and business skirts. It wasn’t intentional but situational…but I can’t believe how easily I breezed through it, unflinchingly. I did fret a bit about it to my friend, but really I was more worried about the fact that I wasn’t worried. Isn’t that odd now? Either I cared a helluva lot for what I was going to say (too much to worry about other things) or I didn’t care a damn about anything. I still can’t decide.

And oddly enough, when I touched down at Mumbai airport, walking down to customs, I realised there was something missing. Passport…check. Baggage tag…check. Backpack, purse, mobile phone….all in place. Ah.

I didn’t feel excited about being home.

I wasn’t sad about being home. I wasn’t happy. I just didn’t feel a thing. No more “I’m home!!!!” feeling. And then it occurred to me….I don’t feel like I’m home. I actually squinted out into the sunshine to check that I had, indeed gotten onto the right flight to the right place. Everything looked right. But it doesn’t feel like home.

I don’t know what or where home is anymore. All this is, now is a place with most of my memories and people I love. But home is a feeling, not a place. One I haven’t had in a long while.

I fly far and I fly wide
But I always come back home

This time, I flew out
But I haven’t come home
Because I don’t remember what home looks like or feels like

Could I maybe come back to the place I took off from
And find you waiting there
And perhaps find that home is indeed,
where the people who make you happy, are?

Will you be the home I come back to?

Also cross-posted on IFSHA.

This post written by Melody seems to have sparked off a storm in the desi blogging teacup. I’m coming in rather late (ah, Saks, don’t smirk at that!!) but I feel compelled to put in my two-bit worth for a lot of reasons.

1. I do have an opinion on this. And this involves three subjects close to my heart (see the title of the post)

2. The discussion seems to have wandered off on weird tangents.

3. I actually agree with the viewpoint of some of Melody’s detractors but not with the way they’ve expressed them.

Okay, let me start again. The question as I understand it was about desi girls and whether they were ‘doing it’ or not. That’s a fact (debatable on either side since there’s no way to really authenticate it). Now whether they should or not is a matter of opinion.

Melody as I know her is a lady with strong conviction in her opinion but (or should I say ‘and’) with no hang-ups about needing others to agree. This is a rarity, I well know. I’m not a big fan of God and religion myself and I admit I’m more than a little biased against religious people. This stems from the fact that all my life I’ve had God thrust on me by people who believe in the concept strongly and tried their level best to force me to. Let me not even start on the cause of most of the violence in the city, in the country and across the world today. My own personal experiences deter me from  being overly fond of the ‘missionaries‘ as I call them.

Melody, however, is NOT a missionary by that definition. In all my interaction with this lady, never once has she tried to convert me or anyone else to her point of view. If anything, I find talking to her refreshing and interesting simply because she has a different point of view from mine and conveys it without needing me to agree. So Sakshi, Sonya, while I’m up there with you on the anti-organized-religion front, I have to say you’re probably equally blinded by your fervour as the fanatics are. With all due respect, it takes all sorts to make a world. Not every religious person is spiritual but they aren’t all mercenaries either.

Coming back to the original question. My take on this is simple. Personal freedom is about the only thing I really believe in. It’s your body, your life. Do what you like with it, take responsibility for it.

If you are a woman, an Indian woman, you are well aware of society’s norms, how they can be flouted and the consequences of being ‘caught’ or even heard and misunderstood. Sex is a personal thing, it means different things to different people. As long as you are able to live with yourself during and after the act, I’m not drawing any judgements on you.

Taking responsibility is vital. If you trust the man, that’s your judgement call. If he dumps you later, feeling used, abused and worse still pregnant (Yes, this is wrong if it wasn’t planned for. If you can adapt to the situation and handle it, I applaud you.), that is a judgement that went wrong and you will have to bear the consequences. If tomorrow, you are married or with another man who is not able to accept the fact that you aren’t a virgin, that’s something you’ll have to deal with too. Either don’t have sex before marriage or make sure to only pick guys who think the same way you do or just learn to face the consequences. Society is like that, try and change it if you dare but there’s no point cribbing over the way it is.

And finally, practise safe sex if you do. It’s good for the world’s population, it’s good for you.

(A side note: There’s a link to another blog here that I haven’t linked to, before. If you’re interested, yes, that was written by me too when I was in a more spiritual/soul-searching frame of mind. I can feel that coming on again so I’m thinking of migrating the posts from there to here and continuing writing future thoughts on this right here.)

Also cross-posted on IFSHA.